Morphological awareness and learning to read Chinese

Abstract

This study investigated the nature of morphological awareness and its relation to learning to read Chinese characters among 46 Chinese-speaking preschool children. The children took a morphological awareness task, which varied in semantic transparency and morpheme position. Children's vocabulary knowledge and extant character reading ability were measured. Additionally, a character learning task was administered. Results showed that children's performances on morphological awareness were affected by semantic transparency but not by morpheme position. Morphological awareness was related to vocabulary knowledge when partialling out character reading ability but not to character reading ability after partialling out vocabulary knowledge. The results of the character learning task further revealed that morphological awareness was related to character identification in the words that were just taught but not to character identification in the words that were not taught or in pseudowords. The relation between morphological awareness and character identification ceased to be significant when partialling out the variance in children's prior knowledge of the characters to be learnt. Taken together, the findings suggested that vocabulary knowledge may play a more important role than reading ability in the initial development of morphological awareness and that the facilitative effect of morphological knowledge in reading does not seem to be significant in the very initial stages of reading acquisition.

Development and Relationships Between Phonological Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Word Reading in Spoken and Standard Arabic

“…This finding is well aligned with the established claim that morphological awareness contributes to school-age students’ performance reading and spelling words or pseudowords (Abu-Rabia et al, 2003; Abu-Rabia, 2007; Saiegh-Haddad, 2013; Taha and Saiegh-Haddad, 2016, 2017). Similar findings have been reported in English (e.g., Deacon and Kirby, 2004; Carlisle and Stone, 2005; Nunes et al, 2006), French (e.g., Casalis and Louis-Alexandre, 2000), Dutch (e.g., Assink et al, 2000), Chinese (e.g., Ku and Anderson, 2003; Chung and Hu, 2007), and Hebrew (Schiff and Lotem, 2011) – to name a few.…”

Effects of Instruction in Morphological Awareness on Literacy Achievement: An Integrative Review

“…Morphological awareness has been found to contribute to school-age students' performance reading and spelling words or pseudowords in English (e.g., Carlisle & Stone, 2005;Deacon & Kirby, 2004;Fowler & Liberman, 1995;Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman, 2006;Singson, Mahoney, & Mann, 2000;Templeton & Scarborough-Franks, 1985;Treiman & Cassar, 1996). Similar findings come from studies in other languages-French (e.g., Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000;Sénéchal, 2000), Dutch (e.g., Assink, Vooijs, & Knuijt, 2000), and Chinese (e.g., Chung & Hu, 2007;Ku & Anderson, 2003)-to name a few.…”

Cross‐language transfer of morphological awareness in Chinese–English bilinguals

“…This body of research has convincingly demonstrated that compound awareness is a significant predictor of literacy development among children who are native speakers of Chinese (e.g. Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu & Shu, 2009; Chung & Hu, 2007; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Li, Anderson, Nagy & Zhang, 2002; McBride‐Chang, Cheung, Chow, Chow & Choi, 2006; McBride‐Chang, Shu, Ng, Meng & Penney, 2007; McBride‐Chang et al, 2008; Shu, McBride‐Chang, Wu & Liu, 2006). Among Chinese–English bilinguals, Wang et al (2009) found that Grade 1 children's English compound awareness explained a small but significant amount of variance (4%) in their Chinese word reading.…”

“…Carlo et al, 2004; Chow, McBride‐Chang, Cheung & Chow, 2008; Nunes, Bryant & Olsson, 2003). On the other hand, there is little doubt that vocabulary forms the foundation for developing morphological awareness because knowledge of root words is required to understand and construct compounds (Chung & Hu, 2007; M. Hao, X. Chen, V. Dronjic, H. Shu & R. Anderson, unpublished data; Kuo & Anderson, 2006). In fact, morphological awareness is often considered to represent vocabulary depth (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2008).…”